Metal Gear Solid is one of the most prolific series in the gaming industry. Hideo Kojima is basically a household name to gamers today. But there is one game in this most adored of series that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as the others. Possibly due to its PSP release, or maybe due to its low sales. Whatever reason that may be, I’m going to talk about the top 7 best things about Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
1)The Fulton System.
Imagine this; You are Big Boss, the best spy in the world, leader of the MSF. You are on a mission to track down a shipment of nukes, but to get there you have to get through a series of guards. You shoot one in the head with your MK.22, a non-lethal tranquilizer gun. The guard, who was conveniently alone and away from eye-shot from other guards, falls to the ground asleep. You sneak your way over to the guard and pull out a small package from your inventory, strap it to the guard, pull a string and watch as the guard gets forcefully jettisoned up into the air. A few seconds later, you get a call from Miller on your radio letting you know they picked the guy up.
That’s the Fulton System in a nutshell. It’s hilarious and basically integral in expanding your army. With the press of a button you get to forcefully “recruit” soldiers and assign them to whichever section you want. It’s a great addition to the series that initially came as the truck in Portable Ops, but perfected in Peace Walker, even if most people first noticed it in Ground Zeroes.
2) You get attached to your soldiers.
So, remember that guy you just launched into the stratosphere? After your mission, you return to Mother Base - your base of operations - and you see him, sitting there in the waiting room patiently anticipating his unit assignment . Then you look again and notice that he has a name, a face, a specific set of skills and even a personality. Let’s say you put him in the Combat Unit. You can now play as this guy (let’s call him Smelt from here on in) in the Extra Ops - these side missions in the game send you on a variety of missions from destroying a weapons cache, to saving a POW by using your Fulton System, to (SPOILER) recovering Snakes equipment when he gets captured in the third Chapter.
This allows you to become more attached to your soldiers, I was even hesitant to send Smelt on an Outer Ops mission, another type of mission that you can send troops of your own on missions such as Taking out a Small Armoured Unit or Taking out an Infantry Unit. These missions can end with the annihilation of the entire enemy team without a single one of your guys taking a hit, or it could end with one of your own men dying for good in the battle. Your men can even become gravely injured and will have to be transferred to Sick Bay, where he will be useless until his injuries are healed.
This ended up with me being afraid to send Smelt into Outer Ops at first. I didn’t want my number 1 man to die on me. Who else would I take into the Extra Ops?
3) Mission Grading.
Peace Walker brought in a ranking system at the end of your missions. Why is this something I especially like about Peace Walker? I like it because it is one of the few things that make a Metal Gear game much better for completionists. Striving to get S rank on all of the missions was extremely tempting, but in the end I personally couldn’t be arsed. Not because the missions aren’t good, they are fantastic, I’m just not a completionist guy but seeing that S rank at the end is still extremely satisfying. Extra Ops also gets ranks, so that Smelt can prove his badassery to the rest of the MSF.
4) Research and Development.
One of the units you can send your soldiers to in Peace Walker is the R&D unit. This lets you develop new items and upgrade your existing ones. Specifications for certain items can be found in actual levels and then you can decide if you want to spend the money and time developing them. For instance, the Mosin Nagant was one of the most exciting finds because I was doing a no kill run, so that would allow me to take enemies down from afar without killing them. Upgrades to your items include things like better suppressor durability, or more health regen from your rations, even things like being able to develop throw-able Strike and Supply request markers. Almost every item you get has 3 upgrade levels, and instead of just minor stat changes, the upgrades feel impactful . For instance, your suppressor will now be able to last throughout 4 waves of heavily armored guards when trying to stealthily take out a tank instead of breaking at a crucial point early in the game forcing you to CQC and taze enemies into submission. Upgrading your items also really gives the impression of a growing army, going from having to carefully choose when to use your suppressor to boxes of the things collecting dust in a closet.
5) Weapon Variety.
This is the first Metal Gear Solid game that had a wealth of options in terms of deadly arms, sometimes literally. Levelling up your weapons increases the damage, reduces the recoil and, when fully levelled, gives you a nice little insignia to prove that you took the time to level that weapon up to max. When I was forced to pick lethal weapons in the boss battles, as I was doing a non-lethal run, I found myself picking different weapons from time to time, even if I had one levelled higher. On the Cocoon boss fight, I might pick the Law and RPG 2, on the Pupa boss fight, I might go with the M16 and the Law, or the M16 and the M47, or maybe I’ll decide to not take an automatic weapon and I’ll choose the M47 and my best friend, Carl Gustav. The variety of weapons in Peace Walker is so high you can almost choose a completely different loadout on every mission, making levelling up all of your weapons very rewarding as you can tangibly feel the weapons you use get better as you play.
6) Mother Base.
A hub based Metal Gear Solid game might sound like blasphemy to a lot of people and while that is completely understandable, Peace Walker did exactly everything they needed to do to make it fun. Just look at how they ripped it out of this game almost wholesale and put it in Phantom Pain. Forcefully recruiting enemy soldiers into your army and rescuing POWs in levels makes expanding your army fun and rewarding. Extra Ops allowed you to get attached to your guys and Research and Development allowed you to have a large arsenal composing of so many different firearms and other mission aiding items like Night Vision Goggles and Rations. Seeing additional platforms being added to the base in the background of the Mother Base screen shows that your efforts in expanding your army also affect where you are stationed. Your soldiers are committed to helping Snake create his vision of Outer Heaven, and that can be added to the list of things that make this game feel rewarding to the player. The culmination of almost every point prior to this, the Management of Mother Base is so compelling and only made better by the fact that you can actually fully explore the version of it in Phantom Pain.
7) Metal Gear ZEKE.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker allows you to create your own Metal Gear. Need I say more?
It’s entirely optional, but why wouldn’t you want to do this? You get to fully customize your own Metal Gear with specific parts and even paint job. You can make that shit hot pink.
Getting pieces by repeating certain boss fights, you construct ZEKE from not only the outside of the old bosses, but also their insides. Taking their AI pods apart, the boards that control their movement, weapons, and other functions to create a beautiful machine of death... Err... Deterrence.
And there it is. I just figured I would outline what I think is a surprisingly under-appreciated game in an otherwise widely lauded series. I feel like this game deserves to be talked about more than it is but anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this!
